Tag Archives: Julia Margaret Cameron

What follows is the next instalment of my re-posting of the various pieces that first appeared in the Financial Times in early 2013, in my discontinued series Hodgson’s Choice. I have had some misgivings about this one, not because of any doubt that the picture is wonderful – it is, and my insistence on having it in my ‘collection’ is unchanged. But re-posting reminds me of the deficiencies of my own scholarship – and nobody much likes that.

Once it appeared in the FT, I was contacted – very civilly – by Scott Thomas Buckle to point out that some weeks before, he had published a long and detailed piece of research updating the rather older research by Colin Ford upon which I had based myself here – to the effect that the model used by Julia Cameron pretty certainly was not the one I wrote about, but another. I simply hadn’t read his article. According to Buckle – and his view will not, I think, be displaced as the orthodox one in the future – the model for the great Iago was not Angelo Colarossi but a member of another family of professional models connected to his, Alessandro di Marco, who posed, among others, for Frederick Leighton and Edward Burne-Jones and the sculptor Sir William Hamo Thornycroft. I don’t doubt that Scott Thomas Buckle is right. But I don’t want to re-write the piece because I’m reposting the series as they were. I hope that the gist of the little piece I wrote is not too badly affected by having the wrong name, because the new sitter proposed was another professional model – a rarity in Cameron’s portraits. The best I can do, I think, is to acknowledge my error and Buckle’s careful research. If anybody wants to follow in his tracks – and you all should, for it’s a fine piece of detective art history – his article is to be found here :

Is this the face of Alessandro di Marco? The forgotten features of a well-known Italian model, by Scott Thomas Buckle. The British Art Journal, Volume XIII No.2, Autumn 2012, pp 67-75

And with that mea culpa, here’s what I wrote, warts and all.

What a piece of work Mrs Cameron was ! Eccentric, name-dropping and unbelievably pushy; absolutely incapable of taking ‘No’ for an answer, she would have been a handful in any society. But as a grand Anglo-Indian administrator’s wife in High Victorian England, she was amazing.

Here’s her niece Laura Gurney casting back her mind: “Aunt Julia appeared as a terrifying elderly woman, short and squat, with none of the Pattle [her maiden name] grace and beauty about her. Dressed in dark clothes, stained with chemicals from her photography (and smelling of them, too) with a plump, eager face and piercing eyes, and a voice husky and a little harsh, yet in some way compelling and even charming… No wonder those old photographs of us, leaning over imaginary ramparts of heaven, look anxious and wistful. This was how we felt. ‘Stand there’, she would shout, and we stood for hours… ”

Her grand-niece, Virginia Woolf, found her pretty odd, too. Here she is: “I must note for future use, the superb possibilities of Freshwater [on the Isle of Wight, where Mrs. Cameron lived], for a comedy. Old Cameron dressed in a blue dressing gown & not going beyond his garden for twelve years, suddenly borrows his son’s coat & walks down to the sea. Then they decide to proceed to Ceylon, taking their coffins with them, & the last sight of Aunt Julia is on board ship, presenting porters with large photographs of Sir Henry Taylor and the Madonna in default of small change.”

For years after that departure to Ceylon, Mrs. Cameron was treated as not much more than an eccentric amateur dabbler. She was an easy target. Her imprecision offended those for whom photography was above all the careful following of recipes. Even today, her deep, deep sentimentality grates with many, and while everybody today acknowledges the portraits as the towering, pioneering achievement they are, there are still many who find her illustrations of Tennyson, her religious allegories, and many of her pictures of children too mawkish – impossible to bring back across the gulf of taste between then and now.

This is one of the very few pictures she made of a professional model. Detailed research by Colin Ford identifies the sitter as Angelo Colarossi, a member of (in effect) a dynasty of professional models. Colarossi posed for Lord Leighton and John Singer Sargent and G.F.Watts among others, and his son posed for Alfred Gilbert’s Anteros, the memorial to Lord Shaftesbury that gets moved every few years as new traffic schemes alter the shape of Piccadilly Circus. The Académie Colarossi, run by a relative, was an art school in Paris, whose students included Amedeo Modigliani and Alphonse Mucha.

It’s important that the sitter was a model: it took skill to sit for the agonizingly long exposures that Mrs. Cameron required. As a result of Colarossi’s professional patience, this portrait has less of that over-excited blur that Mrs. Cameron sometimes went in for, and more control than she sometimes achieved. It’s partly because Colarossi could bear the exposure time that the picture is so startlingly modern. I’ve also, on the other hand, felt it a slight shame the sitter was a model. Given what she did to Thomas Carlyle it would be wonderful to think this a literary or cultural figure whom we could imagine we knew better through the portrait. There’s so much expression in that face it deserves to be associated to a character rather than merely to a professional mien.

Still. Can’t complain. It’s as strong a portrait as anything Nadar ever made. It’s a beautiful print, too, luckily, because there’s only one known print of this portrait, in the Herschel Album which was ‘saved for the nation’ in the mid 1970s. It’s now in the Science + Media Museum in Bradford.

All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.

Woody Allen, Deconstructing Harry

It may be eccentric to draw attention to a show that has been open some time; all I can say is that the show Making It Up: Photographic Fictions has got remarkably little coverage and deserves plenty.

Making It Up is apparently no more than a pleasant little show in the old photography display space at the Victoria & Albert Museum. It brings together images from the museum’s own holdings of every period of photography which – as its title indicates – either aim at something other than the ‘truth’ or use non-‘true’ methods to make their points. So we have a number of beautiful mainstream pictures: a classic Gregory Crewdson, for example, called Temple Street (2006) in which a woman pauses chopping wood in the snowy dusk of a suburban clapboard community. The lighting (electric light just beginning to hold its own against the darkening night), the snow, the slightly menacing stare of the woman who looks at the camera as at an intruder; all these add up to a suggestion of a story. More than that: the very fact of the photograph suggests there was a story worth telling. Crewdson’s trick is to invite us to dive headlong into a picture on the assumption that there must be a story where there may be no more than our own desire to see one.

Gregory Crewdson, (Temple Street); Beneath the Roses, 2006.

In Victorian times, both the methods and the purposes could be very different. Artful posing, liberal use of the dressing-up box, and leadingly significant captions were the standard tools of such ‘allegorical’ photographers as Clementina Hawarden or Julia Margaret Cameron. Collage in its various forms is largely present in this exhibition, as one might expect. Beyond the simple fiction of an untrue caption, it makes the plainest kind of non-true photograph. The sumptuous moralizing multiple-negative confection of Oscar Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life is here, in a later (1876) copy by Robert Crawshay, complete with its ponderously virtuous caption. When (in 1986) Andy Weiner collaged his own face onto a number of mildly comedic scenes, he made his own Rake’s Progress from pub to bed. Weiner made no pretence at seamlessness: we are asked to share the joke, not to be taken in by it. To that extent, Weiner had then much in common with such non-photographic artists as Graham Rawle or Glen Baxter. They, too, put themselves alongside their viewers, to laugh at the absurdity of the world together. In photography, it is the very habit of realism which makes anything unrealistic so seductive.

Graham Rawle, Lost Consonants #876, 2004

So the great photographic storyteller Duane Michals is represented here by a little 1972 narrative in six parts. Two men cross in an alley. Each looks back at the other as they pass, but they do so at different times and no meeting takes place. We think we are seeing a report; it even looks (in modern terms) as though it could have been made by the regular rhythmic discharge of a security camera. But it’s a fiction, as neatly made as a Borges short story, and just as tantalizing at the end.

Duane Michals, Chance Meeting 1972

So the exhibition goes on, piling non-truth upon untruth in profusion. There is a moderate suburban corner which looks just not quite right. It’s a (2000) paper model by Oliver Boberg of a very non-space kind of space, Notown, Nowhere, photographed to look like a real place. The connections with that other great model-maker, Thomas Demand, are obvious; but the connections with a whole register of pop music or film may be more important. Contrast it to a photograph of a developer’s model of some new flats by Xing Danwen (2005).

Xing Danwen, Urban Fiction #23, 2005

The artist has digitally inserted herself on the balcony nearest us, hurrying her nude male visitor away over a wall as a gentleman who might be the husband appears in the dark street below. Here’s a changing room by Bridget Smith (1999) with a couple of squash rackets on the wall, a different kind of neutral space. You have to read the museum caption to discover that it is in fact a set from a pornographic film.

Bridget Smith, Glamour Studio (Locker Room), 1999

False readings, false suppositions, false extrapolations; sometimes people simply make false photographs, too. A few of those are here, including a famous set of salt prints made by advertising photographer Howard Grey in response to a commission from The Connoisseur magazine in 1981, purportedly to ‘test’ the connoisseurship in early photography. The V&A’s own Mark Haworth-Booth was taken in by those, at least at first. Howard Grey worked closely with the painter Graham Ovenden, and the Hetling fakes which they concocted together are closely allied to the group of Howard Grey images here. Roger Fenton’s Valley of the Shadow of Death certainly wasn’t a fake; a famous picture from the Crimean war (1854-5) showing just how absurd it would have been to try to ride horses through a rain of cannonballs; but like the American Civil War photographers of the same period, Fenton was not above moving the elements of the picture to make his point the stronger. In this case, there are known variants of the picture with the cannonballs and without.

There is wonderful variety in this exhibition, of intention as well as of technique. There’s a photographic Chinese scroll by Wang Qingsong, complete with red signature-stamp in the corner. Jan Wenzel makes lightning rearrangements in a photo-booth and then builds the strips up to a coherent whole.

Vik Muniz’ 1997 action shot of Jackson Pollock (after Hans Namuth) is made in chocolate sauce, and his sheer virtuoso confidence in that most unusual of media is itself staggering. Tom Hunter’s use of heavily romantic imagery taken from art history to portray a marginalized group of Londoners is a complex play of allusion and reference far, far from simple reportorial fact.

Tom Hunter, The Vale of Rest (2000), from Life and Death in Hackney.

Jeff Wall is more like a theatre director, Hannah Starkey perhaps closer to a balladeer. Cindy Sherman’s strange mixture of self-portraiture, social anthropology and sheer good humour is as compelling as ever.

H Starkey, Untitled, May 1997

These artists and photographers don’t necessarily have all that much in common. And that’s the point. There has for nearly a hundred years been an insistence that a certain kind of objectivity is the proper stance for the camera. A modernistic look, stripped back, emphasizing by isolation and by composition, and adhering purportedly to a version of the truth. It was a political stance at first, a reaction against the failed mannerisms and mawkish sentimentalism of Pictorialism, and it was intimately tied to a view of the world in which the documentary was properly a tool of the Left. But here’s a splendidly vigorous exhibition which reminds us that it was never the whole picture.

Photography can be and has often been as mannered and as Rococo as any other art form, and that on its own is no reason to reject it. I saw in a recent paper that the great and sometimes austerely modernist composer George Benjamin had just got another rave review for his opera Written on Skin; nothing inherently modernist about opera, you would have thought. There are good, even great Rococo photographs just as there are wholly meretricious modernist ones. Photography certainly can deal in fact and science and truth. But it can also deal admirably in opinion and allegory and metaphor. It’s that side of photography that we saw so much of at the latest edition of Frieze, for it’s back in the ascendant again. Was it this year or last year that I became so enthused by Marcus Coates’ wonderful British Moths? They’re factual, sure enough. But also so much more than that. Come to think of it, there seems to be something in the wind. Just now, we have Hannah Höch showing at the Whitechapel, Mari Mahr and William Burroughs at the Photographers’ Gallery. Bits of their pictures come from bits of the real, no doubt. But not one of them would deign to limit themselves to that. Great photographers don’t, and why should they?

Mari Mahr, From Presents for Susana, 1985

We’ve had the rise and rise of John Stezaker, Maurizio Anzeri, Julie Cockburn… Capital fiddlers, all of them. The most successful photographers in Britain at the moment are probably Gilbert and George, for whom the plain photographic fact has never been more than a jumping off point for the stories they want to tell.

It has always been possible to fiddle about with photographs; more than that, NOT fiddling about has in the past always been a self-conscious and political gesture. Hence the (often spurious) claims to objectivity of such as the f64 tendency. But something has changed. Because millions or billions of unvarnished pictures are made and uploaded every day, their selective and expressive content very much limited to when to fire the camera and in what basic direction, it has become imperative for photographers to reclaim the act of photographing. It comes down again to a distinction I have mentioned here before. Simply to go to a party with an iPhone and take pictures and post them on the internet does not make you a photographer. Nor does using a camera every day to record people parked on yellow lines. We need another word for that, and I’ve been using the expression ‘camera operator’. Photographers are different. They want to use photography to say whatever it is they have to say. It’s not always the truth that photographers tell; it’s their truth. Increasingly, the camera operators are the ones who are content for the picture to say “it was so”.

The photographers have reclaimed the territory that was always more fertile, of reference and argument and persuasion and imagination and narrative, not to mention poetry and allusion. “Maybe it wasn’t so, but this is what I want to say about it.” That’s a wholly proper photographic sentiment, just as it has always been perfectly proper in every other medium. It is because it tracks that sentiment so well and so far back that this unassuming little show in a back gallery at the V&A is so important. Marta Weiss, the curator, may just have pointed out that a tide has changed without our noticing. It may just be that merely to tell the truth in a photograph has finally become as worthy and as ultimately dull as merely to tell it in any other way. Every truth has been told. The truth is no longer enough.

A lot of art students over the years have unearthed Diderot’s message to the artist (not least because it was quoted to telling effect by Walter Friedlander, in a book so famous that even some art students still read it, David to Delacroix): “First move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep stare, be enraged – only then regale my eyes”. You could reshape it now for the generation who want to be photographers beyond merely posting stuff online as it comes out of some image capturing system: “First move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare, be enraged – only then tell me the truth”.

I recently had occasion (as they say in police reports) to visit the Watts Gallery, in Surrey, outside London. The Watts Gallery is dedicated to the work of George Frederic Watts, a superstar painter of the Victorian period. Watts had something of a Dickensian social conscience and also a shameless energy at what would today be called networking. I had a nice time and came away thinking that galleries which revolve around the work of a single artist are often more interesting to a non-specialist than one might expect, provided the artist was good enough to give the curators even a little toehold for imaginative thinking. A small but amazing temporary display at the Watts Gallery, for example, is devoted to his fierce opposition (in Victorian England) to the unnecessary cruelty of killing birds for plumage to use in fashion, particularly as decoration on hats. Who knew that he cared? Hooray for the Watts Gallery, and hooray for smaller galleries and museums in general.

That reminded me of something I noticed a long time ago, which might best be expressed as a question:

Where do these names (below), which include that of Watts, appear in this order?

They appear on the first floor of the two street facades of the Victoria and Albert Museum, titling the seven-foot (or so) sculptures which together add up to a three-dimensional National Portrait Gallery of artists. We think of celebrity as a modern obsession, but it is one that dates from the Victorian period at least. Watts worked for years on his Hall of Fame (much of which ended up in the National Portrait Gallery, itself a uniquely British expression of the cult of celebrity) and he encouraged Julia Margaret Cameron to do something very similar. By the 1890s a popular magazine like the Strand Magazine was publishing Portraits of Celebrities as a regular feature, plying a line half-way between prurience and high-minded example.

The names down to Grinling Gibbons line the Cromwell Road façade, in groups respectively of architects, painters (two groups of six) and sculptors. The two lower groups of five are of craftsmen, and they line the Exhibition Road façade. Interesting that Gibbons makes it into the high art crowd. You could just as well call him a great craftsman. But where should art and high craft meet and mix if not on the façade of the V&A, a museum devoted almost by definition to blurring precisely that boundary?

It is always easy (and never very profitable) to pick holes in other people’s Best Of… lists.

Still, various sorts of points can be made about this list. Here are just a few, for starters:

St. Dunstan was a tenth century goldsmith, silversmith and also a blacksmith (as well as being Archbishop of Canterbury and in effect the principal minister of several English kings). Dunstan is credited as a musician and a fine draughtsman and letterer of manuscripts. Although no doubt obscure today, he could hardly deserve a place on the façade more. William of Wykeham’s place is more open to question. His contribution to architecture is as a patron and client. He was (in the fourteenth century) a great administrator who served twice as Lord Chancellor, and his inclusion here may best be explained by the fact that what was for many years the standard biography (by George Herbert Moberley) was published in 1887, only a couple of years before Aston Webb won the competition to design the Cromwell Road façade in 1891. (It was not to be completed until 1909).

The main door — with sculptures of Victoria and Albert positioned centrally above the arch, and others of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra to each side, as well as the allegorical figures of Knowledge and Inspiration —­­ falls in the list above between Turner and Cosway. This has the odd effect of giving the place of honour, to the right hand of the monarch, to Richard Cosway, who is always described as a notorious libertine. Cosway had caused himself to be appointed Painter to the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), a title held by nobody either before or after. He was a libertine, and also a fop, but he was also an extraordinarily successful self-promoter, a social climber of prodigious ambition, so perhaps it is not so surprising to find him elbowing his figurative way to the middle of the façade. Cosway’s speciality is unfashionable now, because he was miniaturist, but he was a wonderful painter.

William Torel was commissioned by Edward I to make the effigy of Henry III in Westminster Abbey, which is still there (a copy is in the V&A). There’s not much surviving work by Torel. What is recorded, in the words of the Dictionary of National Biography (itself another extraordinary Victorian institution devoted to the cult of celebrity), is that he was a receiver of stolen goods: “His documented career ends on a picaresque note. In 1303, after the burglary in that year of the king’s treasury at Westminster Abbey, William Torel aurifaber is noted as having bought two gold rings from one of the principal suspects in the case.” Again, an odd record for high-minded Victorian and Edwardian committee-men to ignore when agreeing to give him a place on the façade. But he was then more highly considered than now: he is also listed on the Albert Memorial among the sculptors in the Frieze of Parnassus.

While nobody doubts the eminence of Roger Payne, eighteenth century bookbinder, it is worth noting that he made a habit, as few bookbinders have, of signing his work, so that he, too, contributed deliberately to a renown which his works alone might not have guaranteed. Again, his habits so tended to strong liquor that he died penniless; another example where the quality of the work must have appealed to the Office of Works (in charge of commissioning the sculptures) more than the example given by the life.

I’m not – in spite of their prestigious positioning on the outside of the V&A – quite sure of the quality of all of the Cromwell Road sculptures. Several of them were made by students of Professor Edouard Lanteri at the Royal College of Art under a peculiar agency agreement whereby he took a commission for getting his pupils the work. But several of them are very fine. It’s a good museum that starts its work in the street outside.

Thomas Tompion was a clockmaker, by the way. I just looked him up on Wikipedia.